WASHINGTON, D.C. » My first assignments as a stringer for the Star-Bulletin 31 years ago included high school basketball games. I remember covering Campbell, which was led by a 6-foot-3 center named Mike Wise, and Radford, with a 6-foot-1 sharpshooter named Kenny Niumatalolo.
Wise smiled a lot as he played (maybe he picked that up from playing pick-up ball with Magic Johnson at Paki Park). By contrast, Niumatalolo was always serious, and with a bit of what is now called swagger and what we then called cockiness. Turns out the body language wasn’t a true indicator of his humble character. But he still likes to shoot the rock.
"He still stays on the perimeter and launches," says Jeff Harada, who starred at Hawaii Baptist. The Navy women’s assistant basketball coach is a bit younger than the other two and was the Interscholastic League of Honolulu Division II player of the year in 1989. He and Niumatalolo mix it up in the free-play gyms with the Middies at Annapolis when they have time.
As we watched Navy beat UH in football Saturday, I asked Harada if he felt conflicted. He said yes, but added that the Naval Academy is his employer, and you know how that is.
For others of us from Hawaii, maybe we can take some solace in the team subsidized by our state taxes being beaten by another we help pay for, with federal tariffs. Of course if you are a true Rainbow Warrior fan, that doesn’t work. Maybe it helps to think of an alum of the UH football program, Niumatalolo, doing well on the big national stage with off-the-charts class.
Wise is another great success story from a Hawaii public high school, and a graduate of where Harada got his college coaching start, Hawaii Pacific. His joy in playing the game more than three decades ago at Campbell remains alive in his writing as a sports columnist at the Washington Post. He has an office right next to Thomas Boswell’s and Tony Kornheiser’s, a floor above where Woodward and Bernstein worked the pick and roll to perfection in the 1970s.
One of Wise’s recurring themes is reminding his readers this is sports and to have fun — a sentiment often in short supply in this part of the country and even in his part of the building and paper that often grows weary of being labeled as the toy department.
Wise is completely serious about some topics, including that of the Washington NFL team’s nickname. He won’t write the nickname, as nearly a thousand Native Americans "expressly tell me please do not use that name. They don’t want to raise their next generation with some John Wayne (movie) stereotype."
I don’t use the nickname anymore, the same way I wouldn’t write Brownskins if that’s what a Hawaii team was called.
He hasn’t researched it thoroughly, but as far as Wise knows he is 100 percent Caucasian. That makes you a minority in Ewa Beach, where he spent his childhood.
"Looking back, everyone who is not a minority should be on the other side of the fence just once," he said. "It makes you see the world differently. I don’t think I would see this issue the same if I grew up on an all-white cul de sac on the mainland."
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